Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Deception

“Ma’a,” the boy said. Water.

“I’ll bring some,” Scorpion replied in Arabic. “What’s your name?”

“Ghedi,” the boy said, reaching out to touch the white man’s hand as if to make sure he was real. Several of the other boys started to stir. One crawled toward Scorpion, who went to a hallway that led to a crude kitchen and to the sink. In it, a small lizard the size of his hand, with a flat multispiked tail, scuttled away as he approached. He turned the tap but nothing came out. He felt a tug on his sleeve. The boy, Ghedi, looked up at him.

“Where are the girls?” Scorpion asked.

The boy pointed to a doorway. Scorpion went through the doorway to another room, lit by a ray of sunlight through a hole in the ceiling. It was filled with girls in bright blue direhs , some stretched out and covered in filth, others sitting on the floor. School uniforms, Scorpion thought as they began to crowd around him like chicks around a mother hen.

“Follow me,” he told them, leading them through the boys’ room and outside. Once there, he grabbed two handfuls of plastic water jugs from the truck.

“You mustn’t overfeed starving children. Especially at first,” Sandrine had cautioned him on his first day in the camp in the triage area. “Their metabolic system is broken. Too much protein will damage the liver even more, possibly irreparably. Just a moderate amount of water, preferably with electrolytes, and depending on the size of the child, a single Plumpy’nut bar. Pas plus .” No more. “Just to hold them till we can take care of them.”

He spent the next few hours feeding them and using some of the precious water in the plastic jugs to clean them up as best he could and get them settled on a blanket under a plastic tarp awning tied to four poles he rigged up at the corners of the Toyota truck bed. Out of the twenty-four orphan children, who were supposed to have been trapped in the school, only sixteen were still alive. The boy, Ghedi, helped him organize them, and one of the older girls, a pretty little thing with a shy smile named Nadifa, helped him clean up the girls.

The hell of it was he had almost pulled it off. Just another forty kilometers or so to the crossroads at Bilis Qooqaan and then a straight run on paved road of maybe ninety klicks to the Kenyan border. Except for the lousy luck of the roadblock and that idiot, Dowler, Scorpion thought as he looked into the madness-filled eyes of Sheikh Khalaf.

Khalaf pulled Dowler up by his hair to a kneeling position, the belawa gleaming in the sun. He tossed the knife at Scorpion’s feet.

“ Yallah . You do it. Cut his head off,” Khalaf said.

“I’m sure there’s someone who would pay a lot of money for the Eenglizi,” Scorpion said, meaning Dowler. “Let me try.”

“Look at his face. The cigarette marks. The Western media, al Jazeera, would say bad things about us.” Khalaf made a hand gesture like tossing something away that in Somalia means no. “He has to die.”

“Then do it yourself,” Scorpion growled, thinking, Go to hell, you insane son of a bitch.

“No, you do it,” Khalaf said, looking at him strangely. “Unless you want to join him.” The two militiamen shifted their stance, weapons trained on Scorpion. “I take the children. Two of the boys are old enough to be soldiers. The rest. .” He shrugged. “As for the girls, no reason for them to still be virgins before they die.”

He’s lying, Scorpion decided. He’s not going to leave me alive as a witness, or the children, having noted one of the militiamen smiling behind his face scarf. This was just some sadistic game Khalaf was playing.

Scorpion picked the belawa off the ground and put it to Dowler’s throat. He looked at the two militiamen. Which one was slower? The smaller one was working his qat , his cheek bulging like a chipmunk. He’s thinking about something else, Scorpion thought, already moving.

He slashed sideways, whipping the belawa with his wrist, slashing Khalaf’s throat from ear to ear, and without stopping, in a single motion, threw the belawa at the bigger militiaman, the knife embedding deep into his belly. The instant the belawa left his hand, Scorpion dived sideways, pulling at his jeans leg and ripping the Glock from the ankle holster.

The smaller militiaman swung the AK-47 around, but only got two rounds off, missing Scorpion, who fired from the ground, hitting him in the forehead. Scorpion started toward the bigger militiaman, who had pulled the belawa out of his body and was trying to stem the gush of blood with one hand while bringing his AK-47 into firing position with the other. Scorpion shot him in the throat and grabbed the gun.

Then he grabbed Dowler’s arm and pulled him up.

“Run, dammit,” he growled, scooping up his backpack as he yanked Dowler toward the truck, running hard.

Sixty meters.

Dowler stumbled as he tried to keep up. Scorpion spotted about a dozen Al-Shabaab militiamen not far from the truck. They were looking around to see where the shooting had come from.

Fifty meters.

One of the militiamen spotted the two white men running toward the truck and pointed, shouting to the others.

Forty meters.

Dowler was panting heavily, almost falling then catching himself and staggering after Scorpion. Two then three of the militiamen near the road brought their AK-47s into firing position.

Thirty meters.

“I can’t make it,” Dowler panted.

“Fine. I’ll leave you behind,” Scorpion snapped, swinging his AK-47 into shooting position as he ran.

Twenty meters.

Bullets ripped into the sand around them. Scorpion dropped to his knee and fired a burst at the three militiamen, taking them down one-two-three and sending two others scrambling for cover. Pulling at Dowler’s shirt, he ran on toward the Toyota, where one of the older boys peeked over the side of the truck bed, then seeing the running white men, ducked back down.

Ten meters.

A militiaman came around the front of the truck. At a dead run, Scorpion fired a burst from the AK, first missing him, then hitting him in the chest. He flung the cab door open and climbed in, bullets tearing into the metal side of the truck. As he turned the ignition, Dowler, panting heavily, pulled himself into the passenger seat, moving the boy, Ghedi, aside. Dowler pulled the child onto his lap as the truck skidded onto the road.

Scorpion shifted, gunning the accelerator hard as it could go, the noise of the engine drowned by a hail of bullets pinging around the truck or riddling the metal sides, one of them smashing a spiderwebbed hole in the windshield. The speedometer crept up till it hit 135 kilometers per hour; as fast as it would go. The truck rocked and bounced on the uneven road, and he could hear the high-pitched screams of the children as they ping-ponged around in the truck bed.

“Tahrir kala!” Scorpion shouted to them over his shoulder. Hang on! To Dowler: “Are you hit?”

Dowler looked down at his body as if it belonged to someone else. Behind them in the truck side mirrors, racing after them on the road and paralleling them across the dusty savannah, were half a dozen trucks filled with militiamen, all shooting in their direction.

“I’m all right. Who are you?” he said.

“American,” Scorpion said, handing him the AK-47. “Ever use one of these?”

Dowler shook his head.

“Stick it out the window. Hold tight; it kicks. Aim a short burst at one of the trucks. For Chrissakes, try not to shoot one of the kids.”

“I’ll be lucky I don’t shoot myself,” Dowler said, staring at the weapon as if it were something from science fiction.